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Wayland

Ubuntu 13.04 Raring Ringtail has the latest version of Wayland / Weston.
You can run Weston both under X and under DRM/console.

To run on X, you run "weston", to run on DRM, you run it via "weston-launch", but you need to chmod +s the weston-launch binary first.

Then you need to set the GDK_BACKEND environmental variable to "wayland". Then you can run some GTK applications.
But you don't get window decorations, and only some GTK applications work, many don't, and even those who work many crash.

Some applications don't work unless you run them or weston itself via 'dbus-launch', such as gedit and gnome-terminal.
Run them via 'dbus-launch gedit', or 'dbus-launch weston-launch'.

Applications depending on X does not work, since XWayland is not yet merged in.

So basically you can try it out today, but many things don't work yet and there is still lots of development ahead that needs to be done.

I really hope this is just rumor or Ubuntu experimenting.. that would absolutely retarded if Ubuntu decided to make their own display server, especially when Wayland looks so good.
All they would achieve by doing this would be more Linux fragmentation making developers lives even harder. Then of course Steam would probably start targeting Ubuntu's half-assed Display Server, and every other Linux distro would have to do even more work to be able to play Steam games (my feeling is it would really dampen the momentum of Steam on Linux).

Jono must have just misspoke and meant Ubuntu would be using Wayland compositor (instead of Weston).

They might need something leaner/more optimized for their mobile versions of Ubuntu for phones and tablets. I assume this will be out with Ubuntu 14.04.

Wayland was designed with tablets and smartphones in mind. You can't get any leaner and lighter than passing buffer IDs around which is what Wayland is doing, if graphics drivers are of proper quality the ID refers to a buffer in GPU memory, you can't be more efficient than that. Not to mention Wayland also focuses on tear-free and color-correct graphics from the start.

Now, considering the average smartphone has about 2 cores, and 4-cores smartphones are on the way - it's literally paranoid to say it's got "too many" features for a smartphone or tablet, it's like 50K LOC.

I really hope this is just rumor or Ubuntu experimenting.. that would absolutely retarded if Ubuntu decided to make their own display server, especially when Wayland looks so good.
All they would achieve by doing this would be more Linux fragmentation making developers lives even harder. Then of course Steam would probably start targeting Ubuntu's half-assed Display Server, and every other Linux distro would have to do even more work to be able to play Steam games (my feeling is it would really dampen the momentum of Steam on Linux).

Jono must have just misspoke and meant Ubuntu would be using Wayland compositor (instead of Weston).

Jono must have just misspoke and meant Ubuntu would be using Wayland compositor (instead of Weston).

Based on the comments he made on a popular Ubuntu fan site, regarding this topic, I'm pretty sure they're actually serious about this one. Throw in the fact that in the past ~18 months Canonical has gone absolutely batshit crazy, and this is pretty believable.

I think Michael is right that Canonical doesn't have the resources to pull this one off, but actually having something that works well hasn't been a top priority as of late. So I don't think "working" is even a criteria for Canonical.

There is absolutely no chance that Ubuntu makes anything more than insignificant inroads into the mobile space. It will have about as much marketshare in mobile as it does on the desktop. Except in the process they're blowing up the little desktop marketshare they have.

I do not see a way Ubuntu could pull this off, and if they do, it would be really bad for everyone anyway.

There is simply no way this can work. It is either a misunderstanding (and they are doing something more reasonable, like a special Wayland-optimised version of Unity or something), or they are going down in flames.

Who would support this server anyway? Are they going to port all toolkits and apps to it themselves? Not in a million years.